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Headline generation is a challenging subtask of abstractive text summarization, which its output should be a summary, shorter than one sentence. It would be precious to develop a dataset for the evaluation of abstractive summarization methods on this task in the Persian language. There are several datasets for headline generation in Persian, most of which are not large enough to be used by more sophisticated methods of text summarization, such as deep learning models. Moreover, all of these datasets are focused on daily news and there is no dataset for summarizing scientific Persian papers. In this article, we present “ElmNet,” a headline generation dataset of about 400,000 abstract/headline pairs of scientific papers, gathered from six major publishers for scientific articles in Persian. We, moreover, evaluate the performance of the most important deep learning-based headline generation methods, on the proposed dataset. The results prove the comparability of the performance of the state-of-the-art methods on this task, to their results on the existing English datasets.

Scientific research cooperation and co-authored papers are becoming increasingly popular in the era of big science. However, allocating appropriate credit to each co-author of papers remains a challenge. We consider author contribution declarations according to the contributor roles taxonomy (CRediT) scheme (assigning each co-author to 14 contributor roles) and propose a new method of author contribution to allocate co-authors’ credits reasonably by converting the 14 contributor roles in an article into a binary author-role matrix. Based on the data of PLOS ONE, we further explore the new method’s advantages by comparing with other representative methods: It normalizes the total credits of different articles to 1, avoiding the inflationary bias caused by the increasing number of co-authors; awards different credits per co-author based on the participation rate of contributor roles to avoid the equalization bias; reduces the impact of the increasing number of co-authors on the credit of the first co-author.

Enterprise architecture has become an important driver to facilitate digital transformation in companies, since it allows to manage IT and business in a holistic and integrated manner by establishing connections among technology concerns and strategical/motivational ones. Enterprise architecture modelling is critical to accurately represent business and their IT assets in combination. This modelling is important when companies start to manage their enterprise architecture, but also when it is remodelled so that the enterprise architecture is realigned in a changing world. Enterprise architecture is commonly modelled by few experts in a manual way, which is error-prone and time-consuming and makes continuous realignment difficult. In contrast, other enterprise architecture modelling proposal automatically analyses some artefacts like source code, databases, services, etc. Previous automated modelling proposals focus on the analysis of individual artefacts with isolated transformations toward ArchiMate or other enterprise architecture notations and/or frameworks. We propose the usage of Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM) to represent all the intermediate information retrieved from information systems’ artefacts, which is then transformed into ArchiMate models. Thus, the core contribution of this paper is the model transformation between KDM and ArchiMate metamodels. The main implication of this proposal is that ArchiMate models are automatically generated from a common knowledge repository. Thereby, the relationships between different-nature artefacts can be exploited to get more complete and accurate enterprise architecture representations.

Real-time execution of machine learning (ML) pipelines on radiology images is difficult due to limited computing resources in clinical environments, whereas running them in research clusters requires efficient data transfer capabilities. We developed Niffler, an open-source Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) framework that enables ML and processing pipelines in research clusters by efficiently retrieving images from the hospitals’ PACS and extracting the metadata from the images. We deployed Niffler at our institution (Emory Healthcare, the largest healthcare network in the state of Georgia) and retrieved data from 715 scanners spanning 12 sites, up to 350 GB/day continuously in real-time as a DICOM data stream over the past 2 years. We also used Niffler to retrieve images bulk on-demand based on user-provided filters to facilitate several research projects. This paper presents the architecture and three such use cases of Niffler. First, we executed an IVC filter detection and segmentation pipeline on abdominal radiographs in real-time, which was able to classify 989 test images with an accuracy of 96.0%. Second, we applied the Niffler Metadata Extractor to understand the operational efficiency of individual MRI systems based on calculated metrics. We benchmarked the accuracy of the calculated exam time windows by comparing Niffler against the Clinical Data Warehouse (CDW). Niffler accurately identified the scanners’ examination timeframes and idling times, whereas CDW falsely depicted several exam overlaps due to human errors. Third, with metadata extracted from the images by Niffler, we identified scanners with misconfigured time and reconfigured five scanners. Our evaluations highlight how Niffler enables real-time ML and processing pipelines in a research cluster.

Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming popular in real-world scenarios due to current advances in sensor technology and hardware platform development. The applications of UAVs in the medical field are broad and may be shared worldwide. With the recent outbreak of COVID-19, fast diagnostic testing has become one of the challenges due to the lack of test kits. UAVs can help in tackling the COVID-19 by delivering medication to the hospital on time. In this paper, to detect the number of COVID-19 cases in a hospital, we propose a deep convolution neural architecture using transfer learning, classifying the patient into three categories as COVID-19 (positive) and normal (negative), and pneumonia based on given X-ray images. The proposed deep-learning architecture is compared with state-of-the-art models. The results show that the proposed model provides an accuracy of 94.92%. Further to offer time-bounded services to COVID-19 patients, we have proposed a scheme for delivering emergency kits to the hospitals in need using an optimal path planning approach for UAVs in the network.

Recently, virus diseases, such as SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and COVID-19, continue to emerge and pose a severe public health problem. These diseases threaten the lives of many people and cause serious social and economic losses. Recent developments in information technology (IT) and connectivity have led to the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in many industries. These industries, where IoT and AI together are making significant impacts, are the healthcare and the diagnosis department. In addition, by actively communicating with smart devices and various biometric sensors, it is expanding its application fields to telemedicine, healthcare, and disease prevention. Even though existing IoT and AI technologies can enhance disease detection, monitoring, and quarantine, their impact is very limited because they are not integrated or applied rapidly to the emergence of a sudden epidemic. Especially in the situation where infectious diseases are rapidly spreading, the conventional methods fail to prevent large-scale infections and block global spreads through prediction, resulting in great loss of lives. Therefore, in this paper, various sources of infection information with local limitations are collected through virus disease information collector, and AI analysis and severity matching are performed through AI broker. Finally, through the Integrated Disease Control Center, risk alerts are issued, proliferation block letters are sent, and post-response services are provided quickly. Suppose we further develop the proposed integrated virus disease control model. In that case, it will be possible to proactively detect and warn of risk factors in response to infectious diseases that are rapidly spreading worldwide and strengthen measures to prevent spreading of infection in no time.

A number of the people who have recovered from the acute effects of COVID-19 are facing long term sequelae from the infection. As the COVID-19 pandemic is still evolving, so is knowledge of the long-term effects of the virus on patients who still experience symptoms. Clearly, news media play a crucial role in distributing information and this distribution of information can, in turn, influence the actions of the public. The purpose of this study was to describe the content of news coverage of COVID-19 long haul symptoms currently posted on the internet. This study utilized Google News, a news aggregator service, and included the first 100 English language pieces of news. Video content and news article content were coded in depth for information on COVID-19 long haul symptoms. A total of 41% of news reports mentioned the length of time that the COVID-19 related symptoms persist. The length of time was reported to range from 1 month to more than 1 year. The symptom most commonly mentioned was tiredness or fatigue (74%), followed by difficulty breathing or shortness of breath (62 cases; 62%), and difficulty thinking or concentrating (50 cases; 50%). Other symptoms were mentioned less frequently. There were no statistically significant differences in any of the content including having video, written news reports, or both video and written news reports by source of the news reports based on consumer, professional, or television or internet-based news (p = .14). More complete coverage by online news media of the long-term effects of COVID-19 enhances public awareness of the post-acute syndromes, augments health providers' awareness of the range of chronic COVID-19 effects and the possibility of a second infection, increases the probability of patients' seeking and obtaining the proper care for their symptoms, and contributes to preventive actions for enhancing public health.

We report the results of a novel protocol for running online experiments using a combination of an online experimental platform in parallel with web-conferencing software in two formats—with and without subject webcams—to improve subjects’ attention and engagement. We compare the results between our online sessions with the offline (lab) sessions of the same experiment. We find that both online formats lead to comparable subject characteristics and performance as the offline (lab) experiment. However, the webcam-on protocol has less noisy data, and hence better statistical power, than the protocol without a webcam. The webcam-on protocol can detect reasonable effect sizes with a comparable sample size as in the offline (lab) protocol. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40881-021-00112-w.

A prediction model is an indispensable tool in business, helping to make decisions, whether in the short, medium, or long term. In this context, the implementation of machine learning techniques in time series forecasting models has a notorious relevance, as information processing and efficient and dynamic knowledge uncovering are increasingly demanded. This paper develops a model called Variable step-size evolving Participatory Learning with Kernel Recursive Least Squares, VS-ePL-KRLS, applied to the forecast of weekly prices for S500 and S10 diesel oil, at the Brazilian level, for biweekly and monthly horizons. The presented model demonstrates a better accuracy compared with analogous models in the literature, without loss of computational performance for all time series analyzed.

Nowadays, humanity is facing one of the most dangerous pandemics known as COVID-19. Due to its high inter-person contagiousness, COVID-19 is rapidly spreading across the world. Positive patients are often suffering from different symptoms that can vary from mild to severe including cough, fever, sore throat, and body aches. In more dire cases, infected patients can experience severe symptoms that can cause breathing difficulties which lead to stern organ failure and die. The medical corps all over the world are overloaded because of the exponentially myriad number of contagions. Therefore, screening for the disease becomes overwrought with the limited tools of test. Additionally, test results may take a long time to acquire, leaving behind a higher potential for the prevalence of the virus among other individuals by the patients. To reduce the chances of infection, we suggest a prediction model that distinguishes the infected COVID-19 cases based on clinical symptoms and features. This model can be helpful for citizens to catch their infection without the need for visiting the hospital. Also, it helps the medical staff in triaging patients in case of a deficiency of medical amenities. In this paper, we use the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to select the interesting features by finding the best trade-offs between two conflicting objectives: minimizing the number of features and maximizing the weights of selected features. Then, a classification phase is conducted using an AdaBoost classifier. The proposed model is evaluated using two different datasets. To maximize results, we performed a natural selection of hyper-parameters of the classifier using the genetic algorithm. The obtained results prove the efficiency of NSGA-II as a feature selection algorithm combined with AdaBoost classifier. It exhibits higher classification results that outperformed the existing methods.

Methods to quantify biological aging are emerging as new measurement tools for epidemiology and population science and have been proposed as surrogate measures for healthy lifespan extension in geroscience clinical trials. Publicly available software packages to compute biological aging measurements from DNA methylation data have accelerated dissemination of these measures and generated rapid gains in knowledge about how different measures perform in a range of datasets. Biological age measures derived from blood chemistry data were introduced at the same time as the DNA methylation measures and, in multiple studies, demonstrate superior performance to these measures in prediction of healthy lifespan. However, their dissemination has been slow by comparison, resulting in a significant gap in knowledge. We developed a software package to help address this knowledge gap. The BioAge R package, available for download at GitHub (http://github.com/dayoonkwon/BioAge), implements three published methods to quantify biological aging based on analysis of chronological age and mortality risk: Klemera-Doubal biological age, PhenoAge, and homeostatic dysregulation. The package allows users to parametrize measurement algorithms using custom sets of biomarkers, to compare the resulting measurements to published versions of the Klemera-Doubal method and PhenoAge algorithms, and to score the measurements in new datasets. We applied BioAge to safety lab data from the CALERIE™ randomized controlled trial, the first-ever human trial of long-term calorie restriction in healthy, non-obese adults, to test effects of intervention on biological aging. Results contribute evidence that CALERIE intervention slowed biological aging. BioAge is a toolkit to facilitate measurement of biological age for geroscience. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11357-021-00480-5.

The image biomarkers standardization initiative (IBSI) was formed to address the standardization of extraction of quantifiable imaging metrics. Despite its effort, there remains a lack of consensus or established guidelines regarding radiomic feature terminology, the underlying mathematics and their implementation across various software programs. This creates a scenario where features extracted using different toolboxes cannot be used to build or validate the same model leading to a non-generalization of radiomic results. In this study, IBSI-established phantom and benchmark values were used to compare the variation of the radiomic features while using 6 publicly available software programs and 1 in-house radiomics pipeline. All IBSI-standardized features (11 classes, 173 in total) were extracted. The relative differences between the extracted feature values from the different software programs and the IBSI benchmark values were calculated to measure the inter-software agreement. To better understand the variations, features are further grouped into 3 categories according to their properties: 1) morphology, 2) statistic/histogram and 3)texture features. While a good agreement was observed for a majority of radiomics features across the various tested programs, relatively poor agreement was observed for morphology features. Significant differences were also found in programs that use different gray-level discretization approaches. Since these software programs do not include all IBSI features, the level of quantitative assessment for each category was analyzed using Venn and UpSet diagrams and quantified using two ad hoc metrics. Morphology features earned lowest scores for both metrics, indicating that morphological features are not consistently evaluated among software programs. We conclude that radiomic features calculated using different software programs may not be interchangeable. Further studies are needed to standardize the workflow of radiomic feature extraction. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10278-021-00506-6.

The integration of distributed energy resources and the transition to smart cities are shifting the urban energy sector to a decentralized operating system. Blockchain-based microgrids, where small-scale operators trade electricity among each others, have gained remarkable attention recently. However, most of the proposed schemes study smart grids in prosperous cities. In this study, the performance of a solar-based power trading scheme is investigated in a shortage-prone context, Beirut City. Thus, we resort to a game-theoretic approach to model power trading as a repeated game between buildings at the urban scale. Results show that solar energy can cover up to 25% of the city electricity needs, depending on the rooftops area coverage. On the other hand, we found that deploying a peer-to-peer trading scheme has marginal impact since the energy demand in the city exceeds the supply and most buildings would prioritize self-consumption.

The high-resolution scanning devices developed in recent decades provide biomedical volume datasets that support the study of molecular structure and drug design. Isosurface analysis is an important tool in these studies, and the key is to construct suitable description vectors to support subsequent tasks, such as classification and retrieval. Traditional methods based on handcrafted features are insufficient for dealing with complex structures, while deep learning-based approaches have high memory and computation costs when dealing directly with volume data. To address these problems, we propose IsoExplorer, an isosurface-driven framework for 3D shape analysis of biomedical volume data. We first extract isosurfaces from volume data and split them into individual 3D shapes according to their connectivity. Then, we utilize octree-based convolution to design a variational autoencoder model that learns the latent representations of the shape. Finally, these latent representations are used for low-dimensional isosurface representation and shape retrieval. We demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of IsoExplorer via isosurface similarity analysis, shape retrieval of real-world data, and comparison with existing methods. Graphic abstract

Machine learning (ML) is unlocking patterns and insight into data to provide financial value and knowledge for organizations. Use of machine learning in manufacturing environments is increasing, yet sometimes these applications fail to produce meaningful results. A critical review of how defects are classified is needed to appropriately apply machine learning in a production foundry and other manufacturing processes. Four elements associated with defect classification are proposed: Binary Acceptance Specifications, Stochastic Formation of Defects, Secondary Process Variation, and Visual Defect Inspection. These four elements create data space overlap, which influences the bias associated with training supervised machine learning algorithms. If this influence is significant enough, the predicted error of the model exceeds a critical error threshold (CET). There is no financial motivation to implement the ML model in the manufacturing environment if its error is greater than the CET. The goal is to bring awareness to these four elements, define the critical error threshold, and offer guidance and future study recommendations on data collection and machine learning that will increase the success of ML within manufacturing.

In drug development decision-making is often supported through model-based methods, such as physiologically-based pharmacokinetics (PBPK). Global sensitivity analysis (GSA) is gaining use for quality assessment of model-informed inference. However, the inclusion and interpretation of correlated factors in GSA has proven an issue. Here we developed and evaluated a latent variable approach for dealing with correlated factors in GSA. An approach was developed that describes the correlation between two model inputs through the causal relationship of three independent factors: the latent variable and the unique variances of the two correlated parameters. The latent variable approach was applied to a set of algebraic models and a case from PBPK. Then, this method was compared to Sobol’s GSA assuming no correlations, Sobol’s GSA with groups and the Kucherenko approach. For the latent variable approach, GSA was performed with Sobol’s method. By using the latent variable approach, it is possible to devise a unique and easy interpretation of the sensitivity indices while maintaining the correlation between the factors. Compared methods either consider the parameters independent, group the dependent variables into one unique factor or present difficulties in the interpretation of the sensitivity indices. In situations where GSA is called upon to support model-informed decision-making, the latent variable approach offers a practical method, in terms of ease of implementation and interpretability, for applying GSA to models with correlated inputs that does not violate the independence assumption. Prerequisites and limitations of the approach are discussed. Supplementary Information The online version supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10928-021-09764-x.

Blind people can benefit greatly from a system capable of localising and reading comprehension text embedded in natural scenes and providing useful information that boosts their self-esteem and autonomy in everyday situations. Regardless of the fact that existing optical character recognition programmes seem to be quick and effective, the majority of them are not able to correctly recognise text embedded in usual panorama images. The methodology described in this paper is to localise textual image regions and pre-process them using the naïve Bayesian algorithm. A weighted reading technique is used to generate the correct text data from the complicated image regions. Usually, images hold some disturbance as a result of the fact that filtration is proposed during the early pre-processing step. To restore the image's quality, the input image is processed employing gradient and contrast image methods. Following that, the contrast of the source images would be enhanced using an adaptive image map. The stroke width transform, Gabor’s transform, and weighted naïve Bayesian classifier methodologies have been used in complicated degraded images to segment, feature extraction, and detect textual and non-textual elements. Finally, to identify categorised textual data, the confluence of deep neural networks and particle swarm optimisation is being used. The text in the image is transformed into an acoustic output after identification. The dataset IIIT5K is used for the development portion, and the performance of the suggested come up is evaluated using parameters such as accuracy, recall, precision, and F1-score.

Machine learning has been the corner stone in analysing and extracting information from data and often a problem of missing values is encountered. Missing values occur because of various factors like missing completely at random, missing at random or missing not at random. All these may result from system malfunction during data collection or human error during data pre-processing. Nevertheless, it is important to deal with missing values before analysing data since ignoring or omitting missing values may result in biased or misinformed analysis. In literature there have been several proposals for handling missing values. In this paper, we aggregate some of the literature on missing data particularly focusing on machine learning techniques. We also give insight on how the machine learning approaches work by highlighting the key features of missing values imputation techniques, how they perform, their limitations and the kind of data they are most suitable for. We propose and evaluate two methods, the k nearest neighbor and an iterative imputation method (missForest) based on the random forest algorithm. Evaluation is performed on the Iris and novel power plant fan data with induced missing values at missingness rate of 5% to 20%. We show that both missForest and the k nearest neighbor can successfully handle missing values and offer some possible future research direction.

Accurate detection of hate speech against politicians, policy making and political ideas is crucial to maintain democracy and free speech. Unfortunately, the amount of labelled data necessary for training models to detect hate speech are limited and domain-dependent. In this paper, we address the issue of classification of hate speech against policy makers from Twitter in Italian, producing the first resource of this type in this language. We collected and annotated 1264 tweets, examined the cases of disagreements between annotators, and performed in-domain and cross-domain hate speech classifications with different features and algorithms. We achieved a performance of ROC AUC 0.83 and analyzed the most predictive attributes, also finding the different language features in the anti-policymakers and anti-immigration domains. Finally, we visualized networks of hashtags to capture the topics used in hateful and normal tweets., to appear in SN social sciences - special issue on hate speech

Life-threatening novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), also known as COVID-19, has engulfed the world and caused health and economic challenges. To control the spread of COVID-19, a mechanism is required to enforce physical distancing between people. This paper proposes a Blockchain-based framework that preserves patients’ anonymity while tracing their contacts with the help of Bluetooth-enabled smartphones. We use a smartphone application to interact with the proposed blockchain framework for contact tracing of the general public using Bluetooth and to store the obtained data over the cloud, which is accessible to health departments and government agencies to perform necessary and timely actions (e.g., like quarantine the infected people moving around). Thus, the proposed framework helps people perform their regular business and day-to-day activities with a controlled mechanism that keeps them safe from infected and exposed people. The smartphone application is capable enough to check their COVID status after analyzing the symptoms quickly and observes (based on given symptoms) either this person is infected or not. As a result, the proposed Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Interference System (ANFIS) system predicts the COVID status, and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) enhances the accuracy rate to 95.9% compared to state-of-the-art results.

Owing to the quick spread of minute health-related experiences, the distillation of knowledge from such unstructured narratives is an extremely challenging task. In spite of the success of neural networks methods in improving learning structural reliability, they result in inadequate accuracy of the bio-medical sentiment classification when employing less useful features sets. Therefore, they lack discriminatory potential. In this study, we propose to add a deep associative memory into neural networks for an effective sentiment decomposition, which emphasizes correctly on bio-medical entities related to the extraction of different data-object properties, and contextual-semantics dependencies for a given aspect. The underlying trust of these measures is behind the ability to compute the completion of unseen medical patterns, where comprehensive bio-medical distributed representations are used for representing the formal medical connections from PubMed databases. Experiments on a biomedical sentiment analysis task show that the model provides comprehensive embeddings with meaningful medical patterns. It achieved an average performance of 87% on varied large online datasets. It also outperforms baselines in discovering and identifying medical natural concepts. We provide meaningful support to bio-medical sentiment analysis applications in social networks. Indeed, the facets of this study might be used in many health concerns such as analyzing change in health status or unexpected situations.

Satellite imagery is changing the way we understand and predict economic activity in the world. Advancements in satellite hardware and low-cost rocket launches have enabled near-real-time, high-resolution images covering the entire Earth. It is too labour-intensive, time-consuming and expensive for human annotators to analyse petabytes of satellite imagery manually. Current computer vision research exploring this problem still lack accuracy and prediction speed, both significantly important metrics for latency-sensitive automatized industrial applications. Here we address both of these challenges by proposing a set of improvements to the object recognition model design, training and complexity regularisation, applicable to a range of neural networks. Furthermore, we propose a fully convolutional neural network (FCN) architecture optimised for accurate and accelerated object recognition in multispectral satellite imagery. We show that our FCN exceeds human-level performance with state-of-the-art 97.67% accuracy over multiple sensors, it is able to generalize across dispersed scenery and outperforms other proposed methods to date. Its computationally light architecture delivers a fivefold improvement in training time and a rapid prediction, essential to real-time applications. To illustrate practical model effectiveness, we analyse it in algorithmic trading environment. Additionally, we publish a proprietary annotated satellite imagery dataset for further development in this research field. Our findings can be readily implemented for other real-time applications too.

Deep learning models have been very successful in the application of machine learning methods, often out-performing classical statistical models such as linear regression models or generalized linear models. On the other hand, deep learning models are often criticized for not being explainable nor allowing for variable selection. There are two different ways of dealing with this problem, either we use post-hoc model interpretability methods or we design specific deep learning architectures that allow for (more) easy interpretation and explanation. This paper builds on our previous work on the LocalGLMnet architecture that gives an interpretable deep learning architecture. In the present paper, we show how group LASSO regularization (and other regularization schemes) can be implemented within the LocalGLMnet architecture so that we receive feature sparsity for variable selection. We benchmark our approach with the recently developed LassoNet of Lemhadri et al.

Information and Communication Technologies, to a long extent, have a major influence on our social life, economy as well as on worldwide security. Holistically, computer networks embrace the Information Technology. Although the world is never free from people having malicious intents i.e. cyber criminals, network intruders etc. To counter this, Intrusion Detection System (IDS) plays a very significant role in identifying the network intrusions by performing various data analysis tasks. In order to develop robust IDS with accuracy in intrusion detection, various papers have been published over the years using different classification techniques of Data Mining (DM) and Machine Learning (ML) based hybrid approach. The present paper is an in-depth analysis of two focal aspects of Network Intrusion Detection System that includes various pre-processing methods in the form of dimensionality reduction and an assortment of classification techniques. This paper also includes comparative algorithmic analysis of DM and ML techniques, which applied to design an intelligent IDS. An experiment al comparative analysis has been carried out in support the verdicts of this work using ‘Python’ language on ‘kddcup99’ dataset as benchmark . Experimental analysis had been done in which we had found more impact on dimensionality reduction and MLP performed well in the true classification to establish secure network. The motive behind this effort is to detect different kinds of malware as early as possible with accuracy, to provide enhanced observant among various existing techniques that may help the fascinated researchers for future potential works.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly developed over the past several decades. Several related AI approaches, such as Machine Learning (ML), have been applied to research on landscape patterns and ecological processes. Our goal was to review the methods of AI, particularly ML, used in studies related to landscape ecology and the main topics addressed. We aimed to assess the trend in the number of ML papers and the methods used therein, and provide a synopsis and prospectus of current use and future applications of ML in landscape ecology. We conducted a systematic literature search and selected 125 papers for review. These were examined and scored according to multiple criteria regarding methods and topic. We applied quantitative statistical methods, including cluster analysis based on titles, abstracts, and keywords and a non-metric multidimensional scaling based on attributes assigned during the review. We used Random Forests machine learning to describe the differences between identified clusters in terms of the topics and methods they included. The most frequent method found was Random Forests, but it is noteworthy to mention the increasing popularity of tools related to Deep Learning. The topics cover both ecologically oriented issues and the landscape-human interface. There has been a rapid increase in ML and AI methods in landscape ecology research, with Deep Learning and complex multi-step pipeline AI methods emerging in the last several years. The rapid increase in the number of ML papers in landscape ecology research, and the range of methods employed in them, suggest explosive growth in application of these methods in landscape ecology. The increase of Deep Learning approaches in the most recent years suggest a major change in analytical paradigms and methodologies that we feel may transform the field and enable analyses of more complex pattern process relationships across vaster data sets than has been possible previously.

Image encryption algorithms based on Chaotic approach are becoming increasingly popular for remotely sensed images using parallel techniques. It has been demonstrated that the most efficient image encryption algorithms are based on Chaos. Previous research using chaos-based cryptosystems has resulted in poor performance when using a single computer, compromising privacy, security, and reliability. Furthermore, there were issues when vulnerable satellite images were processed. This paper describes a novel chaos-based encryption technique that employs an external secret key and Henon, Logistic, and Gauss iterated maps. The proposed encryption algorithm is capable of efficiently encrypting a large number of images. When the number of images increases, however, these images become very small, and the technology becomes inefficient or impractical. This paper investigates the parallel method of image encryption on a large number of remotely sensed images in Hadoop. Hadoop's file visit method has been enhanced so that it can treat the entire Tiff file as a single unit. Furthermore, the file format is being extended to be supported by Hadoop in order to support GeoTiff in Hadoop. The results of the experiments show that the proposed parallel method for encryption is effective and scalable to a large number of images when compared to other well-known methods.

This paper discusses the progress made so far and future challenges in integrating the analysis of multiple Non-Functional Properties (NFP) (such as performance, schedulability, reliability, availability, scalability, security, safety, and maintainability) into the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) process. The goal is to guide the design choices from an early stage and to ensure that the system under construction will meet its non-functional requirements. The evaluation of the NFPs considered in this paper uses various kinds of NFP analysis models (also known as quality models) based on existent formalisms and tools developed over the years. Examples are queueing networks, stochastic Petri nets, stochastic process algebras, Markov chains, fault trees, probabilistic time automata, etc. In the MDE context, these models are automatically derived by model transformations from the software models built for development. Developing software systems that exhibit a good trade-off between multiple NFPs is difficult because the design of the software under construction and its underlying platforms have a large number of degrees of freedom spanning a very large discontinuous design space, which cannot be exhaustively explored. Another challenge in balancing the NFPs of a system under construction is due to the fact that some NFPs are conflicting—when one gets better the other gets worse—so an appropriate software process is needed to evaluate and balance all the non-functional requirements. The integration approach discussed in this paper is based on an ecosystem of inter-related heterogeneous modeling artifacts intended to support the following features: feedback of analysis results, consistent co-evolution of the software and analysis models, cross-model traceability, incremental propagation of changes across models, (semi)automated software process steps, and metaheuristics for reducing the design space size to be explored.

As social media has become a ubiquitous part of daily life, researchers made a great progress in identifying the emotion in user-generated texts. However, it is a challenging task as people express their emotion in explicit and implicit ways. This paper focuses on the problem of identifying sentiments from implicit sentences which contain no emotional word or phrase. Most of the existing sentiment classification models cannot identify the sentiments accurately since they usually focus on extracting features from grammatical information without taking contextual information into account. In this paper, we argue that the contextual information is the key to identify sentiments in implicit sentences. Moreover, multiple features extracting from different aspects should be taken into account to improve sentiment identification. This paper proposes a multi-feature neural network model considering three aspects: contextual information, syntactic information and semantic information. To better get the semantic information of the sentence, we propose an attention mechanism based on contextual affective space. The experimental results on the SMP2019-ECISA dataset demonstrate that our model outperforms the previous systems and strong neural baselines.

Fault injection attacks (FIA), which cause information leakage by injecting intentional faults into the data or operations of devices, are one of the most powerful methods compromising the security of confidential data stored on these devices. Previous studies related to FIA report that attackers can skip instructions running on many devices through many means of fault injection. Most existing anti-FIA countermeasures on software are designed to secure against instruction skip (IS). On the other hand, recent studies report that attackers can use laser fault injection to manipulate instructions running on devices as they want. Although the previous studies have shown that instruction manipulation (IM) could attack the existing countermeasures against IS, no effective countermeasures against IM have been proposed. This paper is the first work tackling this problem, aiming to construct software-based countermeasures against IM faults. Evaluating program vulnerabilities to IM faults is required to consider countermeasures against IM faults. We propose three IM simulation environments for that aim and compare them to reveal their performance difference. GDB (GNU debugger)-based simulator that we newly propose in this paper outperforms the QEMU-based simulator that we presented in AICCSA:1–8, 2020 in advance, in terms of evaluation time at most $$\times$$ × 400 faster. Evaluating a target program using the proposed IM simulators reveals that the IM faults leading to attack successes are classified into four classes. We propose secure coding techniques as countermeasures against IMs of each four classes and show the effectiveness of the countermeasures using the IM simulators.

Estimating software enhancement efforts became a challenging task in software project management. Recent researches focused on identifying the best machine learning algorithms for software maintenance effort estimation. Most of the research publications investigated the use of ensemble learning for improving software effort estimation. Intending to increase the estimation accuracy over individual models, this paper investigates the use of the stacking ensemble method for estimating the enhancement maintenance effort (EME) of software projects. This paper makes a comparison between two machine learning-based approaches for estimating software EME: The M5P (as an individual model) and the stacking as an ensemble method combining different regression models (GBRegr, LinearSVR, and RFR) using the ISBSG dataset. A correlation-based feature selection (CFS) algorithm is basically used to achieve efficient data reduction. The selected ML techniques-based approaches were trained and tested on a dataset with relevant features leading to the improvement of estimate accuracy. Results show that the software EME estimation using CFS and stacking ensemble method is improved in terms of mean absolute error (MAE) = 0.0383 and root mean square error (RMSE) = 0.1973.

One of the challenging issues in RFID systems is the issue of group ownership transfer and ownership duration. To answer this need recently one protocol which combines group ownership transfer and time bound delegation was proposed by Lee et al. which we call it TBGODP stands for time bound group ownership delegation protocol. A secure time bound group ownership delegation protocol can be used to transfer ownership of a group of tagged devices for a certain period of time, such as renting a smart home. In this paper, we applied different attacks such as traceability and secret disclosure attacks against TBGODP which show this protocol is not a secure one. All attacks presented in this paper, only need one run of protocol eavesdropping and succeed with the probability of one. We also address the vulnerabilities of TBGODP which lead to propose a new secure improved one called $$TBGODP^+$$ . We formally prove the security of $$TBGODP^+$$ in Real or Random (RoR) model and also verify its security using BAN logic. We also evaluate the security of $$TBGODP^+$$ with well-known security analysis tools, namely AVISPA and Scyther. The results of these evaluations indicate $$TBGODP^+$$ can safely transfer ownership of a group of tags to another owner for a specified period of time, and that the new owner’s ownership expires upon time expiration. Comparative analysis of $$TBGODP^+$$ with other related schemes shows that the proposed protocol in terms of computational and communication costs, and execution time is more than other related schemes and this is a cost that should be paid to provide complete security against various attacks.

In order to improve the effect of e-government work, it is necessary to analyze its influencing factors. E-government is affected by many social factors, so it is necessary to combine intelligent models to improve the effect of factor analysis. This paper combines the essence of e-government influencing factor data to improve the machine learning algorithm and uses the EM algorithm to derive the parameter estimation formula of the data in the case of missing data to improve the accuracy of data analysis. Moreover, this article combines the structure of the e-government system to build the main structure of the intelligent analysis model of the influence factors of e-government. According to the key influencing factor model of e-government adoption and multi-dimensional research on technology, organization and implementation, this paper puts forward the model and promotion mode of the e-government system based on cloud computing and conducts a simulation. From the simulation results, the effect of the model proposed in this paper is more significant.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the type of dementia that affects the world's significant population and is expected to be increased worldwide. In recent years, the main focus of researchers is the early diagnosis of AD because of the unavailability of well-known causes and no permanent curative solution for AD-infected patients. A plethora of machine learning algorithms are utilized by various researchers to provide an accurate diagnosis of the patients who fall under the category of Healthy Controls (HC), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), and AD. In this paper, many machine learning algorithms with a special focus on various feature extraction and fusion techniques are explored in detail, which are used by the researchers to investigate various categories of AD from the Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI). Therefore, a systematic review of different feature extraction methods such as statistical, spatial-based, and transform-based is presented in this paper. Further, various open-source standard datasets that researchers used to detect AD from medical images are also discussed in detail. As some of the feature extraction techniques mentioned above generate redundant and large feature sets that significantly affect the classification accuracy, therefore, in this paper, we have also discussed several dimensionality reduction methods available for the extraction of relevant features from medical images. Moreover, future directions are also provided to researchers to aid in the early detection of brain disorders which may be helpful to add productive years to the lives of AD-contaminated patients.

Computer, Internet, and Smartphone have changed our life as never before. Today, we cannot even imagine our life without these technologies. If we look around, we find everything, everywhere connected and controlled by system and software. We find amazing software and mobile applications which have become nerve of our daily life. Our dependency on this software and systems is so and so much that it is scary even to imagine, what if this system fails at any point in time. There is always a threat surrounded by various types of cyber-attacks. Every day cybercriminals are evolving their attacking strategy. Cyber-attacks using ever-more sophisticated malware are the major cause of concern for all types of users. Cyber-world has witnessed rapid changes in malware attacking strategy in the recent past. The volume, velocity, and complexity of malware are posing new challenges for malware detection systems. A scalable malware detection system with the capability to detect complex attacks is the time of need. In this paper, we have proposed a scalable malware detection system using big data and a machine learning approach. The machine learning model proposed in the system is implemented using Apache Spark which supports distributed learning. Locality-sensitive hashing is used for malware detection, which significantly reduces the malware detection time. A five-stage iterative process has been used to carry out the implementation and experimental analysis. The proposed model shown in the paper has achieved 99.8% accuracy. The proposed model has also significantly reduced the learning and malware detection time compared to models proposed by other researchers.

Transmission lines are one of the most important components of a Power System. Overhead transmission lines run for hundreds of kilometres to supply power to the cities. At the same time, these lines are very susceptible to damage due to myriad reasons which include natural causes like particle contamination or technical reasons such as insulation failures, which do not immediately lead to a fault but lead to a phenomenon known as partial discharge (PD). Partial discharge is a localized dielectric breakdown which does not completely bridge the space between the two conductors in a small portion of a solid or liquid electrical insulation system under high voltage stress. Partial discharges slowly deteriorate the condition of the power line and, if left unrepaired, can lead to potential faults. Partial discharges are also a proven way of diagnosing the condition of power cables. This paper describes an approach towards detecting partial discharge signal patterns using machine learning algorithms and hence, predicting potential faults. The model described in this paper was able to detect PD patterns with 97% accuracy.

Twitter is an intensely utilized platform for disaster events and emergencies. Therefore, Twitter is an important resource for providing the essential information. Named entity recognition (NER), which is the process of determining the elementary units in a text and classifying them with pre-defined categories, plays a significant role to extract essential and usefulness information. However, NER is a challenging task due to the utilized informal text in the Twitter platform such as grammatical errors and nonstandard abbreviations. In this paper, recurrent neural network (RNN)-based approaches considering diversity of activation functions and optimization functions with NER tools are utilized to extract named entities such as organization, person, and location from the tweets. Inputs for RNN models are provided via two different NER tools which are natural language toolkit (NLTK) and general architecture for text engineering (Gate). Then, pre-labeled data are trained via GloVe word embedding technique, and RNN model variants such as LSTM, BLSTM, and GRU are demonstrated. Therefore, outperforming models among RNN variants are presented for predicting named entities. Yellowbrick interpreter is used for evaluation of the proposed method and Wilcoxon signed-rank test are applied on results of two different data sets to demonstrate consistency of the proposed method. In addition, comparison is made with existing machine learning methods. The experiments by utilizing the Nepal earthquake Twitter data set show that the RNN-based approaches achieve good results in finding named entities. In emergencies, the results of this paper can help in reducing the efforts of event location detection and provide better disaster management.

Medical free-text records store a lot of useful information that can be exploited in developing computer-supported medicine. However, extracting the knowledge from the unstructured text is difficult and depends on the language. In the paper, we apply Natural Language Processing methods to process raw medical texts in Polish and propose a new methodology for clustering of patients’ visits. We (1) extract medical terminology from a corpus of free-text clinical records, (2) annotate data with medical concepts, (3) compute vector representations of medical concepts and validate them on the proposed term analogy tasks, (4) compute visit representations as vectors, (5) introduce a new method for clustering of patients’ visits and (6) apply the method to a corpus of 100,000 visits. We use several approaches to visual exploration that facilitate interpretation of segments. With our method, we obtain stable and separated segments of visits which are positively validated against final medical diagnoses. In this paper we show how algorithm for segmentation of medical free-text records may be used to aid medical doctors. In addition to this, we share implementation of described methods with examples as open-source package .

With the rapid development of the Internet of things (IoT) technology, how to effectively predict the network security situation of the IoT has become particularly important. It is difficult to quantify the IoT network situation due to a large number of historical data dimensions, and there are also has the problem of low accuracy for IoT network security situation prediction with multi-peak changes. To solve the above problems, this paper proposed an adaptive IoT network security situation prediction model, which makes the IoT network security situation prediction accuracy higher. Firstly, the paper used the entropy correlation method to calculate the network security situation value sequence in each quantization period according to Alarm Frequency (AF), Alarm Criticality (AC), and Alarm Severity (AS). Then, the security situation values arranged in time series are fragmented through the sliding window mechanism, and then the adaptive cubic exponential smoothing method is used to initially generate the IoT network security situation prediction results. Finally, the paper built the time-varying weighted Markov chain to predict the error value and modify the initial predicted value based on the error state. The experimental results show that the model has a better fitting effect and higher prediction accuracy than other models, and this model’s determination coefficient is 0.811. Compared with the other two models, the sum of squared errors in this model is reduced by 78 %-82 %. The model can better reflect the changes in the IoT network security situation over a while.

With the rapid development of cloud computing technology, online recommendation services have been a new trend for providing specific information on topics such as lifestyle, fashion news and a variety of other activities. Recommendation algorithm is crucially important for the delivery of personalized services to users. Currently, the key important problem is how to improve the quality of online recommendation services. To solve the problem of goods popularity bias, this paper introduces the prevalence of items into user interest model, and proposes an item popularity model based on user interest feature. Usually, traditional models do not consider the stable of users’ interests, which may make it hard to capture their interest. To deal with the above situation, we propose a time-sensitive and stable interest similarity model to calculate the similarity of user interest. Furthermore, a novel algorithm termed as item popularity similarity with time sensitivity (IPSTS)is proposed by combining the above two kinds of similarity model, and they are assigned different weight factors to balance their impacts. In this paper, we conduct the comparative experiments to evaluate the proposed approach and the traditional collaborative filtering algorithms. The final experimental results indicate that IPSTS can effectively reduce the value of Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE).

The internet is expanding its viewpoint into each conceivable part of the cutting-edge economy. Unshackled from our web programs today, the internet is characterizing our way of life, regardless of whether it's sitting in front of the TV or driving an independent auto. The enchantment of the internet appears to be relatively unbounded. In any case, with each new spell there comes an ever-increasing amount of data, and interest for computational power. Cloud computing which is an on-request conveyance of computing power, applications, database storage, and other IT assets by means of the Internet has violently expanded our computerized lives. Though, there have been critical improvements as far as accessibility, fluctuation, time and quality in administrations are concerned; the unbounded development of our computerized way of life requires monstrous measures of power, especially for the data centers that fill in as the mind of the advanced economy. Data organizations foresee a decrease in the quantity of data centers, as more businesses close their little data centers and move towards cloud computing. All things considered, the move by clients towards cloud, will increase the general energy utilization significantly, exceeding any energy productivity increase; which has recorded for over 70% of data center development in 2018. Many research advancements are already made in this domain for minimizing the energy utilization of the computing types of gear included; for efficient power energy consumption, decrease of carbon impression and e-squander. These procedures are supporters of green cloud computing, which are focused on planning and advancing energy-proficient activities to contain inordinate energy utilization in data centers. This paper discusses different mechanisms for lowering the power utilization in data centers. It provides in depth detail about the various mechanisms that can be employed at the hardware component level so that the utilization of energy by component can be reduced. Techniques that can be applied at network, cluster of servers’ level along with the various dynamic power management measures that can be employed at the hardware or firmware level and can lead to energy efficient or green data centers are also studied in detail. The paper concludes with the research challenges for building the green data centers.

This paper presents a simplified Busbar Protection Scheme for HT/EHT Busbars. Presently for Busbar Protection scheme, Busbar current Differential Relays are being widely used around the world. In this Paper, we evolve that the cost-effective Busbar protection is being achieved by the back-control method of the Incomer’s Highset OC & EF trip function by the outgoing feeders’ OC & EF start function. The objectives are achieving Busbar protection by utilizing the outgoing and incomer feeders’ OC & EF Relays itself, to eliminate the CT, DC and Tripping circuits complexity that exists in the conventional Busbar protection scheme, to achieve the reduction in cost and control room area for Busbar Protection scheme, to make easiness in future expansion of bays in respect of Busbar protection.

Recently, Elhabob et al. proposed an identity-based encryption with authorized equivalence test (IBE-AET), which allows authorized testers to check whether messages in two ciphertexts are the same or not under the identity-based setting (Cluster Computing, 2020). This paper looks into the security and correctness of their IBE-AET construction. More specifically, contrary to the security claim in the original paper, we point out that their proposed scheme cannot achieve the indistinguishability under adaptively chosen identity and ciphertext attacks (IND-ID-CCA2) for adversaries who do not have authorization. In terms of the correctness of the scheme, we also identify that their type-4 authorization does not work correctly. Finally, we remedy their construction in order that it satisfies the IND-ID-CCA2 security with the rigorous security proof as well as the type-4 authorization works correctly.

Institutions—defined as strategies, norms and rules (Ostrom Understanding institutional diversity, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005)—are omnipresent in third sector contexts. In this paper, we present the Institutional Grammar (IG) as a theoretically informed approach to support institutional analysis in third sector research. More specifically, the IG coding syntax allows the researcher to systematically wade through rich text and (transcribed) spoken language to identify and dissect institutional statements into finer syntactical segments of interest to the researcher. It is a versatile method that can generate data for small- or large-N research projects and can be integrated with mixed-method research designs. After first introducing and describing the IG, we present a case study to illustrate how a IG-based syntactic analysis can be leveraged to inform third sector research. In the case, we ask: Do the rules embedded in regulatory text addressing the involuntary dissolution of charity organizations differ between bifurcated and unitary jurisdictions in the United States? Using IG’s ABDICO 2.0 syntax, we identify eleven “Activation Condition” (AC) categories that trigger action and assess variation among the 46 jurisdictions. We ultimately conclude that the rules do not differ between bifurcated and unitary jurisdictions, but that finding is not the primary concern. The case demonstrates IG as an important methodological advance that yields granular, structured analyses of rules, norms and strategies in third sector settings that may be difficult to identify with other methods. We then emphasize four areas of third sector research that could benefit from the addition of IG-based methods: analysis of (1) rule compliance, (2) inter-organizational collaboration, (3) comparative study of institutional design, and (4) the study of institutional change. We close the paper with some reflections on where IG-based analysis is headed.

Children’s fine motor skills are linked not only to drawing ability but also to cognitive, social-emotional, self-regulatory, and academic development Suggate et al. Journal of Research in Reading, 41(1), 1–19 (2018), Benedetti et al. (2014), Liew et al. Early Education & Development, 22(4), 549–573 (2011), Liew (2012) and Xie et al. (2014). Current educators are assessing children’s fine motor skills by either determining their shape drawing correctness Meisels et al. (1997) or measuring their drawing time duration Kochanska et al. (1997) and Liew et al. (2011) through paper-based assessments. However, these methods involve human experts manually analyzing children’s fine motor skills, which can be time consuming and prone to human error or bias Kim et al. (2013) and Lotz et al. (2005). With many children using sketch-based applications on mobile devices like smartphones or tablets Anthony et al. (2012), computer-based fine motor skill assessment has the potential to address limitations of paper-based assessment by using automated measurements. In this work, we introduce a machine learning approach for analyzing aspects of children’s fine motor skill development. We performed a study with 60 young children (aged 3 to 8 years old), and we implemented classifiers that determine children’s age category based on features related to fine motor skill, predominantly for curvature- and corner-based drawing skills, surpassing the performance of our previous work Kim et al. (2013) and of human evaluators. We also present dedicated discussion and statistical testing of sketch recognition features which will further enhance automated fine motor assessment.

With the development of multimedia technology and network technology applications, it is possible to implement online teaching systems in schools. This article aims to realize the design of online English teaching system based on interactive speech recognition system. The teaching system uses the characteristics of English course learning to develop an online English teaching design system based on interactive speech recognition technology. This article uses a deep learning model in the process of establishing the model, using mathematical methods, and fitting a nonlinear function while performing linear calculations. In order to improve the recognition accuracy, the DNN-HMM model is used, which greatly improves the recognition rate of the online English teaching system. The need for labeling speech frames is more urgent in traditional training acoustic models, and many problems have arisen as a result. The step of labeling speech requires strong professionalism and a large workload, and there is no way to adapt to the processing of massive data. The system established in this paper no longer requires a lot of work for annotation, but combined with the CTC layer, the cyclic neural network plays an important role in the process of processing speech sequence signals, and the relationship between data can be used in the process to build LSTM-The CTC model makes data processing faster, and finally makes the English teaching system work more fluently and improves work efficiency, which is of great significance. In the training, this paper discovered the characteristics of LSTM network training such as large amount of calculation. Extract the command from the voice message, and then proceed further. Through the establishment of this system, it meets the needs of English teaching in most schools, enables students to communicate with teachers online, can better achieve learning goals and obtain good benefits.

Over the years, several architecture of smart home has been proposed to enable the use of ambient intelligence. However, the major issue with most of them lies in their lack of high reliability and scalability. Therefore, the first contribution of this paper introduces a novel distributed architecture for smart homes, inspired by private cloud architectures, which is reliable and scalable. This implementation aims at simplifying and encouraging both the deployment of new software components as well as their reutilization to achieve the activity recognition process inside smart homes. The second contribution of this paper is the introduction of the LIARA Environment for Modular Machine Learning (LE2ML), a new machine learning workbench. Its design relies on a microservices architecture to provide a better scalability as well as smaller and faster deployments. Experiments demonstrate that our architecture is resilient to both a node failure and a total power outage. Moreover, the workbench obtained similar results, as regards the performance of the recognition, when compared to previously proposed methods.

There are several public cloud service providers (CSPs) across the globe supplying a variety of application, platform, middleware, database, and infrastructure services. The brewing challenge before any cloud user is how to be sure about the trustworthiness of a service being offered by various CSPs. With the overwhelming usage of cloud services by individuals and organizations, this problem has acquired a lot of attention these days. Precisely arriving and articulating that this particular service from a specific cloud CSP is trustworthy is becoming complicated because of many moving variables in this whole phenomenon. There are varying parameters and indicators for decisively proving that a particular service is trustworthy or not. In order to meet up this crucial challenge and concern being widely expressed by cloud customers, researchers and cloud professionals across the world have unearthed a few viable mechanisms. There are fresh algorithms, techniques, and tools to enable cloud users towards easily and quickly selecting trustworthy services. This paper digs deeper and dwells at length about the intrinsic challenges being associated with the provenance of the trustworthiness factor. The paper also presents a machine learning approach to compute the trust factor of CSPs and it is found that the methodology gains advantage when compared to similar works.

This paper presents a teaching method applied in a usability research course that is part of a bachelor degree programme at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. The method employs visualisation techniques of the user–website interaction, a design practice popular in other fields, but less often used in usability studies. The theoretical background of the data visualisation method, as well as examples of its use in research, are presented and discussed in this paper. In addition to presenting the method, the paper evaluates and analyses how students have responded to it. Using the technology acceptance model, we identified the perceived usability of the method as the main factor influencing students’ behavioural intention to use it in the future.

Fuzzy grey cognitive maps (FGCMs) have been widely adopted to support cause-and-effect decision-making under uncertainty. However, capturing the information for the initial state vector and the relationship matrix from various specialists can be cumbersome, which may affect the convergence of FGCMs or cause them to reach a chaotic state. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel group decision approach based on the combination of grey clustering (GC) and fuzzy grey cognitive maps for assessing causal relationships in uncertain environments. The main contribution consists in applying GC as a mean to obtain the initial state vector from the relationship matrix data. This halves the required inputs to the users, reducing uncertainty in the computational model. Also, the proposition brings a method for aggregating the linguistic judgements of multiple decision-makers when assessing causal relationships. The proposition also differs from others in the literature by providing results with lower imprecision levels, named greyness, and lower number of required iterations for the FGCM-based system to converge. A real application was conducted in a technology start-up to test the approach to practical implications. Results allowed the identification of important elements regarding the company’s profile and performance, aiding prioritization and enabling the development of action plans. This paper also includes a comparison of other representative models with the proposed approach, which led to more accurate results. Hence, this study addresses the need for new alternatives to improve the reliability and convergence of FGCM-based systems. Finally, suggestions for future applications are proposed.

There have been considerable advancements in multimedia technologies over the past 5 years. It has been observed that state-of-the-art multimedia systems face three broad categories of challenges: (1) Dependency on continuous network connections, (2) Data-sharing applications & collaboration, and (3) Security issues. Among these, security vulnerability poses a major threat to modern multimedia systems. Therefore, it is imperative to carefully investigate the security issues that can endanger wireless and mobile communications. At present, multimedia security research mainly focuses on wireless traffic monitoring, wireless system attacks, and wireless and mobile security. In this paper, we have used the network attack-type, “Reconnaissance”, which contains two types of malicious activities: (1) OS scanning, and (2) Fuzzing. The goal of this paper is to quantify multimedia security risks due to Fuzzing by using various types of machine learning models. The highest accuracy i.e., 96.8%, is obtained using the XGBoost classifier, which is good compared to the existing models present in the literature. This is the first paper, to the best of our knowledge, that uses machine learning methods to differentiate between benign and malignant Fuzzing attacks.